Tribal custom requires the groom to make his home with his wife’s family, the couple sleeping in the general living room with the remainder of the family; but with the more progressive pueblos, and with the Sia to a limited extent, the husband, if he be able, after a time provides a house for his family.
The Sia wear the conventional dress of the Pueblos in general. The women have their hair banged across the eyebrows, and the side locks cut even midway the cheek. The back of the hair is left long and done up in a cue, though some of the younger women, at the present time, have adopted the Mexican way of dividing their hair down the back and crossing it in a loop at the neck and wrapping it with yarn. The men cut their hair the same way across the eyebrows, their side locks being brought to the center of the chin and cut, and the back hair done up similar to the manner of the women.
Fig. 5.—Women and girls bringing clay.
The children are industrious and patient little creatures, the boys assisting their elders in farming and pastoral pursuits, and the girls performing their share of domestic duties. A marked trait is their loving-kindness and care for younger brothers and sisters. Every little girl has her own water vase as soon as she is old enough to accompany her mother to the river in the capacity of assistant water-carrier, and thus they begin at a very early age to poise the vase, Egyptian fashion, on their heads.
Bureau of Ethnology.
Eleventh Annual Report. Plate. VI
STONE HOUSE, SHOWING PLASTER ON EXTERIOR.
There is no employment in pueblo life that the women and children seem so thoroughly to enjoy as the processes of house building. ([Fig. 5.]) It is the woman’s prerogative to do most of this work. ([Fig. 6.]) Men make the adobe bricks when these are to be used. In Sia the houses are adobe and small bowlders which are gathered from the ruins among which they live. It is only occasionally that a new house is constructed. The older ones are remodeled, and these are always smoothly plastered on the exterior and interior, so that there is no evidence of a stone wall. ([Pl. vi.]) The men do all carpenter work, and the Sia are remarkably clever in this branch of mechanism, considering their crude implements and entire absence of foreign instruction. They also lay the heavy beams, and they sometimes assist in other work of the building. When it became known that the writer wished to have the earth hardened under and in front of her tents the entire female population appeared at the camp ready for work, and for a couple of days the winds wafted over the plain the merry chatter and laughter of young and old.